Hen! quanto minus est cum to vivo versari

     Quam erit (vel esset) tui mortui reminisse!

    “Alas! how much less the delight of thy living presence
     Than will (or would) be that of remembering thee when thou hast
     left us!”

I want to stop here—­I the Poet—­and put in a few reflections of my own, suggested by what I have been giving the reader from the Master’s Book, and in a similar vein.

—­How few things there are that do not change their whole aspect in the course of a single generation!  The landscape around us is wholly different.  Even the outlines of the hills that surround us are changed by the creeping of the villages with their spires and school-houses up their sides.  The sky remains the same, and the ocean.  A few old churchyards look very much as they used to, except, of course, in Boston, where the gravestones have been rooted up and planted in rows with walks between them, to the utter disgrace and ruin of our most venerated cemeteries.  The Registry of Deeds and the Probate Office show us the same old folios, where we can read our grandfather’s title to his estate (if we had a grandfather and he happened to own anything) and see how many pots and kettles there were in his kitchen by the inventory of his personal property.

Among living people none remain so long unchanged as the actors.  I can see the same Othello to-day, if I choose, that when I was a boy I saw smothering Mrs. Duff-Desdemona with the pillow, under the instigations of Mr. Cooper-Iago.  A few stone heavier than he was then, no doubt, but the same truculent blackamoor that took by the thr-r-r-oat the circumcised dog in Aleppo, and told us about it in the old Boston Theatre.  In the course of a fortnight, if I care to cross the water, I can see Mademoiselle Dejazet in the same parts I saw her in under Louis Philippe, and be charmed by the same grace and vivacity which delighted my grandmother (if she was in Paris, and went to see her in the part of Fanchon toute seule at the Theatre des Capucines) in the days when the great Napoleon was still only First Consul.

The graveyard and the stage are pretty much the only places where you can expect to find your friends—­as you left them, five and twenty or fifty years ago.  I have noticed, I may add, that old theatre-goers bring back the past with their stories more vividly than men with any other experiences.  There were two old New-Yorkers that I used to love to sit talking with about the stage.  One was a scholar and a writer of note; a pleasant old gentleman, with the fresh cheek of an octogenarian Cupid.  The other not less noted in his way, deep in local lore, large-brained, full-blooded, of somewhat perturbing and tumultuous presence.  It was good to hear them talk of George Frederic Cooke, of Kean, and the lesser stars of those earlier constellations.  Better still to breakfast with old Samuel Rogers, as some of my readers have done more than once, and hear him answer to the question who was the best actor he remembered, “I think, on the whole, Garrick.”